Human Nature Quotations

Quotations about our very own human nature.

Showing 37 through 72 of 87 quotations in this category.

"Many are stubborn in persuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal."

-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"We seek our happiness outside ourselves, and in the opinion of men we know to be flatterers, insincere, unjust, full of envy, caprice and prejudice."

-Jean de La Bruyere

"All men are tempted. There is no man that lives that can't be broken down, provided it is the right temptation, put in the right spot."

-Henry Ward Beecher

"We often make people pay dearly for what we think we give them."

-Comtesse Diane

"There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel no one else has a right to blame us."

-Oscar Wilde

"Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect."

-Herbert Spencer

"The closing years of life are like the end of a maquerade party, when the masks are dropped."

-Arthur Schopenhauer

"Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts."

-David Herbert Lawrence

"Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around: to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise."

-Adolf Hitler

"Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards."

-George Orwell

"What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy? "

-George Orwell

"Most of my adult life I have not been listening fully. I only listened long enough to determine whether the speaker's ideas matched my own. If they didn't, I would stop listening, and my mind would race ahead to compose an argument against what I believed the speaker's idea or position to be."

-John Francis, environmental activist

"A feeble mind, conscious of its own feebleness, grows feeble under that very consciousness. As soon as the power of fear becomes known to it, there follows the fear of fear, and, on the first perturbation, reason abandons it."

-Hector Berlioz

"The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' -- this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats."

-Aldous Huxley

"It's frightening that some people literally prefer ignorance because it's comforting and easier to comprehend."

-Paul LaClair

"Sometimes we put up walls, not to keep people out, but to see who cares enough to knock them down."

-Anonymous

"Rare is the person who can weigh the faults of others without putting his thumb on the scales."

-Byron J. Langenfeld

"We compound our suffering by victimizing each other."

-Athol Fugard

"A lot of people want to change the world, but only a few people want to change themselves. When it comes to the issue of race in America, we have to do both."

-Senator Bill Bradley

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."

-Bertrand Russel

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool."

-Richard P. Feynman

"If you can't sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there and worrying. It's the worry that gets you, not the loss of sleep."

-Dale Carnegie

"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."

-Oscar Wilde

"Only the weak are cruel. Gentleness can only be expected from the strong."

-Leo Buscaglia

"A friend should be one in whose understanding and virtue we can equally confide, and whose opinion we can value at once for its justness and its sincerity."

-Robert Hall

"It is no tragedy to do ungrateful people favors, but it is unbearable to be indebted to a scoundrel."

-Fracois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld

"Man is the cruelest animal."

-Nietzsche

"For one cause will not do;
We must state many, one of which is true."

-Lucretius

"Many know how to please, but know not when they have ceased to give pleasure."

-Sir Arthur Helps

"For many men that stumble at the threshold are well forewarned that danger lurks within."

-William Shakespeare

"Do we not see all humans unaware
Of what they want, and always searching everywhere,
And changing place, as if to drop the load they bear?"

-Lucretius

"How many people become abstract as a way of appearing profound!"

-Joseph Joubert

"A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights."

-Napoleon

"When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other."

-Eric Hoffer

"The injury we do and the one we suffer are not weighed in the same scale."

-Aesop

"Conversation would be vastly improved by the constant use of four simple words: 'I do not know'."

-Andre Maurois